Reply

Author

Email

Date/Time

10 Dec 2016 3:22:43am

Text

PreviousMessage

Cont.Perhaps you missed my comment below: "My own view is that religion will have a powerful intellectual presence while ever the relationship between what perceives and what is perceived is unresolved - because it is in this confusion that we find the religious concepts of soul and mind and consciousness." My own view is that people are objects that perceive (i.e. human experience is what it is like for human objects to perceive), and that we come to understand the real through comprehending what we perceive (so that eventually we are able to recognize that we are objects that perceive and that perception is a mechanism that occurs in the real). A thought passes because it is no longer perceived according to the same mechanical explanation that says you no longer see the computer screen when an opaque object is put in front of it or when you look somewhere else.You conceive there is an underlying power to all phenomena. This comment tells us nothing about the real and nothing about perception. The proposition that there is such a power makes no sense which is why it is unproblematic to say that God does not exist. The confused and contradictory identities claimed for God over the last 5,000 years is confirmation enough of the point, which is to say, the concept of God is not like a Celestial Teapot because the idea of a Celestial Teapot is well defined enough to make sense.A human is a particular sort of object that perceives. Humans observe bodies ceasing to function and call it 'death'. It makes no sense to ask whether humans survive their death - obviously they don't.Consciousness is not a scientific concept. Most notably, nobody has ever seen a mind, or fragments of consciousness, following bodies around, or seen them disappearing during sleep and reappearing on waking. Nobody has any inkling why this transcendental entity should have any association with the real or why it should mirror it in an erratic fashion which for all the world looks like physical perception. Careful examination will show that all this confusion about mind and consciousness is just self-referential nonsense.Lastly, it is unwise to use a list of respectable historical names to justify a point of view. There are a lot of skeletons in that cupboard.